“I fear the virus has reached the marrow, my lady,” Franco returned grimly. “It is too deep to be killed off now.”
She reached a hand to cup his cheek. “There is more than one way to cleanse a man of his malaise,” she promised with an enigmatic smile that was portent and absolution both.
Unsurprisingly, this sentiment did not seem to cheer him in the least.
“Well then,” said Dagmar with his usual robust humor, “let us proceed.”
Saying farewell to Franco and Ramu, Ean and Isabel took their reins in hand, and then Dagmar was ushering them across the node.
They emerged beneath moonlit darkness into a snowbound wilderness of luminous ice. A bracing wind swarmed around them, whereupon Ean became instantly grateful that Isabel had made him bring his heavy cloak and fur-lined gloves. Blinking into the stinging wind, Ean saw a man approaching out of the snow-filled darkness.
Tall and broad of shoulder, his silhouette struck so similar a form to Rinokh’s that Ean was at once transported to that fateful night the Malorin’athgul had invaded their camp. The prince stiffened in alarm, but Isabel placed a calming hand upon his arm, and he realized that of course this could not be Rinokh. Still, the unsettling vision and the painful memories it had evoked did not immediately depart.
“I entrust you to capable hands, my lady,” Dagmar murmured, indicating Rhakar as the latter neared.
Isabel kissed Dagmar’s cheek to show her gratitude.
Dagmar nodded to both of them by way of farewell and vanished with a backwards step.
“My lady Isabel,” came a deep voice, and Ean turned to find the Sundragon closing in on them.
Up close, with his jet-black hair and slightly rounded nose, Rhakar resembled Ramu more than Rinokh. But Rhakar’s features were fiercer than his brother’s, with a heavy brow hooding penetrating yellow eyes. He had the sort of build that lent itself to power over grace, yet he moved as agilely as the zanthyr.
Isabel squeezed Ean’s hand. “Ean, may I present Şrivas’rhakárakek, Shadow of the Light.”
“My lord,” Ean greeted with a slight bow.
Rhakar looked him over with one sweep of his fiery eyes. “You are like your brother,” he remarked in a deep voice somehow reminiscent of a waterfall’s elemental thunder, “the one I found in the well. The First Lord thinks very highly of that one to have sent us in search.”
Ean blinked at him, unsure how to respond to such a greeting.
Isabel sensed Ean’s discomfiture. “Rhakar, might you illuminate us with what you’ve learned in your observations of this mercenary troop?”
“As you wish.”
The drachwyr motioned them to follow him and turned to lead away into the night, back in the direction from which he’d come. “I have been concealing my presence on the currents since following them across the node into Tyr’kharta,” Rhakar advised in his deep rumble. “The better to observe them unnoticed. The castle is sorely lacking for men considering who they bait to their trap—no doubt the lad intends a proper army to arrive before week’s end, when you would be expected.”
“Army?” the prince croaked.
Rhakar settled him a level look. “I sense dismay in you, Ean val Lorian, but are you not a wielder? It should be a small task for a ringed wielder to take on a few hundred men.”
While Ean was digesting this staggering idea, Isabel noted, “He is a lad, the wielder you followed?”
“By my estimation not more than twenty and eight.”
Ean thought such an age warranted a different appellation than ‘lad,’ but he conceded when you were thousands of years old, twenty and eight was but a raindrop in the well of time.
“Tyr’kharta is a busy place under the cover of darkness,” Rhakar continued. “I’ve made only distant inspection, yet whatever it is they are about, they dare it not when common eyes might easily see. I do not think your young wielder is involved in the greater dealings of this place. There have been…altercations. The second strand currents are awash with activity.”
Ean frowned. “You mean—”
“The nodes into the castle are in heavy use,” Isabel explained. Then, to Rhakar, she asked, “Have you any other ken of the wielder?”
Rhakar turned her a telling look, his yellow eyes fierce. “I have never seen a man so wound through with compulsion, as like a mutineer bechained and cast into Tethys’ depths.” He shifted his yellow-eyed gaze to Ean. “You will see what I mean when you face him.”
“But he cannot work the fifth?” Ean asked.
“Not that he revealed to me—and he’s been busy seeing that you won’t either. I’ve not witnessed so many patterns used in warding since before Tiern’aval fell. You are lucky the lady needs no protection and conceals herself well upon the currents, for such patterns as he has conceived would occupy even the mightiest of us. Here now,” he said then, drawing their attention as they emerged from the forest onto a jutting precipice, where the trees thinned. The wind howled as it careened along the cliff, tearing at hair and cloaks and stealing their breath with its bracing chill.
Far aloft in the distant sky, a waxing moon shone down through the crystalline night, illuminating a forested valley blanketed in snow. Low upon the far mountainside, the lights of a sizeable castle glowed, multiple windows winking golden or pale-white behind glass half-frosted over. Along the exterior wall of what must’ve been a great hall, arched, stained-glass windows hailed as brilliant gems. They cast colorful shadows onto the wavering black waters of a wide river that hugged the castle’s base.
“Tyr’kharta,” Rhakar rumbled. “It is garrisoned with Saldarians. Expect some resistance.”
Ean thought this a sizeable understatement. Even now he could see dark shapes moving among the parapets and other shadows passing beneath the colorful lights cast upon a path bordering the river—guards on regular patrol. “Do we have any idea where my men are being held?” Ean asked. Then he added heatedly, “Shade and darkness, do we even know if they’re in there?”
Rhakar observed him steadily, and Ean did not like his intimation as he answered, “You will uncover these truths when you enter, Ean val Lorian.”
“Thank you, Rhakar,” Isabel said. “You have helped us greatly.”
Rhakar nodded as if this was abundantly clear. “Take care with the outermost ward,” he remarked. “It lays this side of the river.”
“Yes, I see the pattern,” Ean murmured. He was in fact already unworking it—it settled him to have something to do with his mind, actually. “I have it nearly undone…”
His comment drew Rhakar’s eye. “Then you have regained Arion’s talents,” he observed with a measure of new appreciation in his tone. “My brother Náiir and I had wagered upon the matter. I fear Náiir has won the bet.”
Ean blinked at him. Could the man really be so callous as to have gambled against the likelihood of his Awakening?
“Delicacy is not one of Rhakar’s strong-suits,” Isabel offered gently, laying a gloved hand on Ean’s arm. “He meant no insult.”
To which the Sundragon looked at Ean as if wondering how anyone could be offended by aught he’d said.
Ean gathered himself and shook his head. “No,” he replied, feeling slightly unbalanced in Rhakar’s company. “No offense taken.”
“Khoob, that is well for the sun,” Rhakar muttered with barely concealed annoyance. “Ramu tells me you must enter alone. Therefore, I bid you fair hunting. Farewell, Lady of the Light, and your shepherd too.”
With that, he turned and retreated into the darkness.
“What did he mean by that?” Ean asked as he gazed after him. He was relieved Rhakar had gone, for the man unsettled him. And yet…he still would’ve liked to have had his aid.
“It is an old name of mine,” Isabel meanwhile answered. “The drachwyr remain fond of it.”
She moved nearer to him then, and Ean drew her close and enfolded her within his cloak. Resting his chin upon her head, he let his gaze drift back to t
he castle and wondered not for the first time what in Tiern’aval he was doing attacking a fortified stronghold with naught but an intermittent memory as ammunition. Yet Ramu and Rhakar both believed such an endeavor to be a minor task for a trained wielder.
Ean consoled himself that surely Björn must believe this too, else he wouldn’t have let him leave, but he couldn’t bring himself to trust wholly to such a truth. He knew the Vestal’s ideas of Balance too well for the illusion to be entirely convincing.
Before he’d faced Rinokh, Ean had been certain of his own infallibility. Now he feared any mistake would be his last. The idea of dying had become abhorrent to him, not because he feared death in itself, but because it was intimately connected to disappointing Björn—and even more so to losing Isabel. The latter idea disturbed him so intensely that it crippled him to even consider it.
“Are you ready for this, Ean?” Isabel asked, ever sensitive to his thoughts.
“I have to be, don’t I?” He was desperately aware of her closeness, of the lifetimes he’d failed and lost her. He stared at the distant castle, coldly luminous and laden with deadly patterns, and dreaded going there. The whole enterprise felt entirely wrong. “It seems my path has ever led into ruin,” he murmured.
“It is not the path that will betray you, my love, but the choices you make upon it.”
Ean exhaled a heavy sigh. “Then let me make no choice that keeps me from your side.”
“Epiphany willing, it will be so,” Isabel agreed, and she lifted her head and kissed him to seal the prayer.
Thus did they head into battle.
***
Işak’getirmek paced the length of Tyr’kharta’s great hall, shoulders hunched, hands clasped behind his back, cursing Dore Madden with every breath.
He waited in a state of agitated malcontent, his limbs twitching beneath the compulsion to confront the stranger who was approaching. Işak’s first strand pattern confirmed that a single presence moved through the distant night—untimely though his arrival was—and he dreaded that the intruder might actually be Ean val Lorian.
The irony, Işak thought bitterly. He understood better now Dore’s corrupt and malicious sense of humor. He’d never quite grasped the undertone of delight Dore exhibited in setting him to the task of apprehending Dannym’s prince, but now that the Lord Captain had confirmed his suspicions, Işak held a grim new understanding of the depths of Dore’s depravity.
Along the length of the hall, tall candles burned in iron chandeliers before each vaulted stained-glass window. Their light cast colors out into the night, but within the vast hall, deep troughs of lingering darkness remained. Işak paced within one such tunnel of shadows.
He’d experienced a momentary lightening in the emptiness of his soul when Rhakar’s presence had vanished from the currents, but the relief was a transient flash, the spark of a dying star as it fell across the sky. Nothing could truly alleviate the churning devastation that ravaged him. His velvet mask concealed the horror that his features could no longer hide, but his grieving soul bore no such shield. Its gossamer flesh had been laid bare to the sun of searing truth, and the blistered remains bled endlessly.
Işak had learned from Dore that memories could be occluded, buried, hidden beneath veils of the fourth as dense as a vat of pitch. It was a terrible thing to do to a man…though sometimes necessary. Far more brutal, however, was giving him new memories to supplant the old, for the two would ever be at war, the man himself split, fractured, ever denying pieces of himself. Even as Işak was now.
He’d thought himself beyond the capacity for tears, that the horrors of N’ghorra, compounded tenfold by Dore’s vicious indoctrinations, had bled him dry of grief, but understanding now the enormity of what had been done to him, Işak found that tears could still come.
The mask hid them the same way it hid his shame, even as it hid a visage he could never again claim as his own. Dore had taken everything from him save the will to see the man himself lying in pieces at Işak’s feet. He vowed to his charred and bleeding soul that somehow…some way…he would free the world from the scourge that was Dore Madden, even if it meant his own end—and praying, in truth, that this is exactly what it would mean.
The first-strand pattern Işak worked resonated again, and Işak knew his quarry neared. His hands twitched at his sides, guided now by Dore’s implanted will, by the patterns that were claiming Işak’s body without his consent. The moment was nigh, Dore’s clock of compulsion winding down to the fateful hour of reckoning. Işak wondered if he would still be sane when all was said and done…if indeed he dared profess to sanity even now.
The first-strand pattern vibrated more strongly in his skull. Işak felt certain that any moment the man would fall into one of his wards—he could not be so close without hitting them. Had any of them been tripped or even attacked with elae, Işak would’ve known. He’d spent countless hours meticulously connecting his wards into a vast web, so that any attempt to break or alter one would set the whole web buzzing. Moreover, Dore had long before cast his own nets about this castle to conceal his other activities, to snare unwanted eyes and turn away their interest.
Yes, Dore Madden was hiding much beneath Tyr’kharta’s icebound halls, which made it the perfect place to lay a trap for a prince.
Yet it seemed the man came on without disturbing a single ward.
Işak felt the first-strand pattern growing stronger still, just as a distant horn sounded in alarm. He cursed heatedly, harsh words that echoed a grim warning in the hall.
How could the man have evaded his wards? Had he some skill unknown even to Dore Madden? Işak had no way of learning what was happening beyond the hall without revealing himself and disrupting his own traps. He growled in fury, momentarily captive to his own devices.
At least he’d prepared for such a contingency. There was some consolation in this. The moment the horn sounded, the Nodefinder Waryn would act—no doubt he’d already done his duty and was now half a world away with Işak’s prisoners in tow.
Işak spun and headed back toward the far end of the hall, thinking again through the intricate trap he’d constructed for Ean val Lorian.
When he and the Karakurt had first devised their plan, she’d told him not to underestimate the prince, that whatever else he might be—burgeoning wielder or aught unknown—Ean was either very skilled or uncommonly lucky. He had several times eluded or escaped her own assassins when by all rights he should’ve died.
They had therefore taken due precaution, layering plans within plans to ensure that whether Ean came wielding great power or extraordinary luck, their leverage would not be lost.
However, Işak had taken steps beyond even this level of planning—for whatever else Dore had done to him, he’d trained Işak to be paranoid of unforeseen occurrences, of the perils of misjudgment, and of a wielder’s inevitable trickery. So while he fumed at his sudden powerlessness, he yet knew that in the final confrontation, he would prevail. Much to his soul’s utter ruin.
***
Ean stole down the dim stone passageway beneath the Castle of Tyr’kharta, sword in hand. His elae-enhanced awareness moved far in advance, so that he’d already unworked each ward long before he and Isabel reached it. She moved confidently in his shadow carrying her Merdanti staff. In her blindfolded state, she saw better in the darkness than he could with naked eyes, and she often warned Ean of approaching guards in time for him to fell or silence them without raising an alarm. Thus did they progress from the moonlit night into a different darkness among twisting passages and cold, dim tunnels.
“Two guards, right passage,” Isabel murmured, a bare whisper, and Ean drew up short and pressed back against the cold stones just shy of the intersecting hallway.
The guards’ boots fell soft, but Ean was also keen to them in subtle ways, his perception sharpened to a fine point with elae infusing his pattern. The guards stepped past the prince, and their duller senses noticed Ean’s presence too late. He had them jus
t as they began to turn. The first fell without ever drawing his sword, the second but a heartbeat later.
Isabel knelt and placed a hand on the first one’s face, finding the truthreader’s hold. Three breaths, and she moved to the second man. Frowning then, she sat back on her heels. “A foul craft pervades this place, Ean. These men know nothing about your friends and too much about a host of tortured others.”
Ean felt her controlled anger filtering across the bond. He had never seen her display aught but compassion, and the power roused by her fury startled him. It hinted at a role in Björn’s game which Ean would not have imagined of her.
“The patterns of warding are inconsistent,” he said by way of mutual discord, his own unease over the entire endeavor growing ever more potent. “Layered…as if worked at different times by different men.”
Isabel rose. “Lead us on, my lord,” she said, but her voice had become as steel.
They moved off down the passage again, yet now Ean couldn’t find his focus. Instinct told him something was very wrong, but he couldn’t see the thread that was missing from the whole. He gazed into a room of shadows trying to discern one from the next.
“Ean,” Isabel warned in a low voice. Then: “Ean!”
Too late he heard her. He stepped into a pinwheel chamber of intersecting hallways, and Saldarians flooded in.
Ean swung to block a sweeping sword borne by a giant cornstalk of a man. Their blades met and scraped, but Ean was the better swordsman and the man fell back in blood. Two others came on to take his place, however, and the prince swore as he realized more men were arriving still. He was too conscious of Isabel in harm’s way, and as a third troop came in from the left and Ean swung furiously to deflect a host of blades, he cursed even that single moment of unawareness. He was so immediately outnumbered that he reached in desperation for the fifth—
Suddenly Isabel was at his side spinning her Merdanti staff. Two men fell to left and right while Ean fended off the blades of three attackers. Another cried out from behind as Isabel cast him into a wall, where he collapsed. Two others immediately joined him in motionless silence.
The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) Page 83
